This has been a busy year so far, and we have lots of wonderful news about the Herman Prigann Legacy Project. Herman’s work was mentioned in several articles and books and was the subject of an American graduate student’s thesis (this would have made Herman particularly happy). With the help of Dr. Dieter Ronte, we found a permanent home for Herman’s archive (more about that in a separate post). And we made a donation to two museums! One of them is the subject of this post.

Herman lived on Mallorca for many years. The island played a significant role in his artistic process, particularly in his painting. We therefore found it important that part of his work remain on the island. We are very happy that two of his paintings – Platons Höhle (Plato’s Cave, 1993) and Die Schamanin (The Shaman, 1997) – are now part of the permanent collection of the Can Prunera Museum in Soller. Eva Choung-Fux, a great artist and wonderful friend, helped us immensely in making this donation happen. Until January 31, Can Prunera is showing a retrospective of her work, Desprès de la fi del món.

The fact that we can finally make this announcement makes us incredibly happy. We spent years looking for a good home for Herman’s archive. This was something really important to him. He wanted the material to be professionally archived and maintained. He also wanted it to be accessible to the public for research purposes and to museums for exhibitions. So we began our search, contacting several institutions, even organizing a trip to visit one of them, but none seemed like a good fit. We had close to 30 boxes and 10 artist’s folders of documentation pertaining to his work in the landscape, correspondence, notebooks, biographical material, photos, videos, etc. Even old film material of happenings and art actions in Hamburg in the 1960s! We wanted to make sure everything ended up at the right place. Thanks to Dr. Dieter Ronte – art historian and former director of the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Sprengel Museum Hannover and the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, as well as an old friend of Herman’s since his time in Vienna – we eventually found the Rheinisches Archiv für Künstlernachlässein Bonn. This spring everything finally came together, and the archive made the trip from Mallorca to its new home in Germany.

The next time you’re in Vienna and in the mood to see some of Herman’s work “live,” stop by mumok. The Modern Art Museum has two paintings in its collection: Die drei Grazien (The Three Graces, 1986) from the series “Vienna Paintings” and Begegnung (Encounter, 1978).

Herman was a prolific sketcher; his notebooks fill boxes. Not only preparatory sketches and detailed drawings for his landscape projects, but also countless books filled with spontaneous sketches. At times unsettling, often playful, they invite the spectator to discover an artist revisiting and experimenting with ideas and motifs that show up in other aspects of his work.

These sketches are taken from a notebook Herman started on 2/1/1990 on a train from Vienna to Bonn. The first page contains the following note: a small kaleidoscope of the human dance. The selection of sketches depicting human figures and animals reflect a motif that frequently appears in Herman’s paintings, including the works The Hunter and Norne shown above.

During the early 80s, Herman and his family lived in Tiznit, Morocco for a while. The house lay between the desert and the ocean, and the windows had no glass. The light flooded the rooms and sometimes so did the sand when the wind was particularly strong. Herman painted and earned a bit of money illustrating textbooks for the small, local school. The two paintings shown here are amongst the few that still exist from this period.

Images of Animus and Anima is amongst the most mysterious works that Herman painted on Mallorca. The three paintings form a triptych: “pope and death in love”, “images of animus” and “images of anima”.

Our online exhibition continues with three of Herman’s most vibrant and beautiful paintings, Relation and two from the Dance series. All three belong to the Spanish period and were painted on Mallorca in 1992.